1 Introduction

As an educational researcher doing research on disruptive behavior in schools, I am often invited to schools to do talks on my research on disruptive behavior. I usually always structure my talks around questions like What is disruptive behavior? Why is disruptive behavior in schools a problem? Are problems related to disruptive behavior bigger than 30 years ago, etc.? I always also ask the question: “What are the characteristics of the typical disruptive student?” The question is asked rhetorically and provocatively, and it often tends to foster quite strong emotional reactions among the teachers, as they argue that a typical disruptive student cannot be identified because classroom disruptions most often originate from many different contextual factors and thus not as something that can be reduced to a question about individual student characteristics. At one of my recent talks, a teacher answered the question in a way that I hadn’t been confronted with previously. She said that over the last couple of years, and much to her annoyance, she felt an increasing intolerance toward students who were noisy and disruptive. She also described how she tended to use more arbitrary and—according to herself—unreasonable methods to sanction individual (often boys’) student’s disruptive behavior. She explained her lower threshold for disruptive behavior by the fact that the public schools in Denmark over the last couple of years have been including a greater amount of students that previously were part of special needs education. According to the teacher, this movement has changed the dynamics in many classrooms. And second, she explained how teachers today are being monitored and held accountable for individual student performance in new and highly increased ways. The teacher further described how this shift in educational policy affected her relationship with her students because she, as a teacher, was obliged to focus more on individual student performance and as a consequence she was also becoming more vigilant vis-à-vis students displaying disruptive behavior. Subsequently, the teacher’s account got backing from many other teachers in the room, as they expressed a growing concern about less time for preparation of teaching, more top-down management and goal-steering, and consequently less mental resources to tackle disruptive behavior in class.

Most educational systems have over the last 20 years increased their focus on definable and measurable student learning outcome. Concurrently, disruptive behavior and disciplinary problems have globally been identified as growing concerns. Within this paper, when “disruptive behavior” is discussed, it serves as a catch-all for students who exhibit behaviors that are classified as disruptive, oppositional, and rule-breaking. After describing the shift in educational philosophy and practice toward more outcome-based education, this chapter will follow two tracks. The first track describes how and why disruptive behavior is a major concern in most educational systems as both teachers and students report being plagued by noise and disruptive behavior in schools.

In the second track of the chapter, I will discuss how the described changes toward measuring student learning outcome have changed our understanding and attitudes toward student’s disruptive behavior. I am by no means making light of the problems related to disruptive behavior in schools, and the chapter acknowledges that disruptive behavior is one of the biggest problems in most Western educational systems. My aim with the chapter is rather to stress how the notion of disruptive behavior—from a cultural–historical perspective—is changed with an increasingly outcome-based educational practice and how this practice potentially creates new problems related to disruptive behavior by changing the general approach to disruptions and disruptive students. The chapter thus mainly focuses on how general changes in education affect the attitudes toward disruptive student behavior, whereas the chapter does not address how students themselves make sense of the phenomenon of disruptive behavior.

2 Outcome-Oriented Education

In 2001, the OECD published the first results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). And while there had been movements and actions from the late 1950s and onward that preceded the PISA-project, the publication of the first PISA-results became extremely influential and led to changes in public debate and educational policies in most participating countries (Biesta, 2015). It is, for example, often pointed out how the British, the German, and a couple of Scandinavian countries were confronted with so-called PISA-shocks when the PISA-results were published in the beginning of the 2000s. Pongratz (2013, p. 471), for example, describes how the (negative) PISA-results stirred up the German education policy landscape as never seen before, and that no other empirical study had been able to create as much public resonance as the publication of the German PISA-results did.

The massive impact of PISA reflects the fact that most educational systems in recent years have witnessed a global educational reform agenda in which we have seen a rise in quantification, standardization, competition, and focus on student learning outcome (Sahlberg, 2011). Biesta (2010) describes how the reform agenda also has spirited a new language of learning in education in which everything there is to say about education has been translated into a language of learning. Schools are learning communities, students are learners, teachers have become learning facilitators, school psychologists are learning consultants, and so on. This so-called “learnification” tends to transform educational matters into a question about how the individual student learns most effectively. And education thus easily becomes a question about quantifiable learning outcome on individual, institutional, and global levels (how much does a student score on a national test, what is the grade point average of the school, how do students do in math compared to students from other countries?).

In the same spirit, Stoller (2015, p. 317) argues that education today is permeated by a logic of learning outcomes (LOM). LOM reflects how definable and measurable student learning outcome has become a requirement for justifying educational and curricular practices. Stoller draws parallels between LOM and a new form of “Taylorism” in which school teachers to a much greater extent are made accountable for their teaching practice and where their teaching is “controlled vis-à-vis high-stakes testing and pre-packaged, corporate curricula aimed specifically at teaching to the tests” (Stoller, 2015, p. 317).

Robbins and Kovalchuk (2012: 198) describe how school development today is characterized by “a mindless logic of quantification and measurement,” where schools are (forced to be) concerned with measuring and producing enormous amounts of data about their students, their drop-out rates, grades, sickness absenteeism, socioeconomic status, etc.

LOM can also be considered a neoliberalization of education. Neoliberalism is a term almost used exclusively by those who are critical of it, and finding someone admitting to being neoliberal might prove difficult (Ball, 2012; Biebricher, 2014; Sugarman, 2015). Add to this that neoliberalism also has become a detached signifier that is used to describe an abundance of different movements and tendencies. Nonetheless, it is widely accepted that most educational systems have shifted toward an increasingly outcome-based and thus also neoliberal school ideology (Davies & Bansel, 2007; Sugarman, 2015; see also Wardekker’s chapter in this volume).

3 Disruptive Behavior in the Outcome-Oriented School

One of the trademarks of the neoliberal school is, as abovementioned, a very strong (and narrow) focus on student learning outcome. This means that education is measured almost solely in academic terms, whereas the normative questions about other purposes of education seem to be left ignored. As a consequence, educational research and policy have paid increasing attention to factors that both increase and hinder student learning. And in this context, disruptive behavior is often identified as one of the main contributors to a poor learning environment. Disruptive behavior and lack of school discipline are by no means new phenomena. But as a consequence of educational evolution, modern education generates more disturbance, noise, and student disruption because our visions and ideals of students and learning have changed. Among other things the view of the more active and engaged students was catalyzed in the 1970s by Vygotsky’s emphasis on the importance of spoken dialogue for children’s cognitive development and at the same time educational research also began showing how students’ involvement in active dialogue had a positive effect on their academic achievement (Mercer & Dawes, 2014). Today, most educational systems are characterized by a dialogical teaching ideal in which

  • teachers require thoughtful answers to their answered questions,

  • questions provoke further questions and are buildings blocks of further dialogue and talk,

  • individual teacher–pupil and pupil–pupil exchanges are chained into coherent lines of enquiry and are an integral part of teaching (Mercer & Dawes, 2014).

The dialogical teaching ideal encourages students to talk and engage actively in teaching, which creates what could be termed constructive disruptive behavior, where disruptions of teaching reflect the fact the students feel safe, comfortable, and engaged in teaching (Szulevicz, 2016).

In some ways, it seems, however, that students almost have become too active in teaching. Or at least that many students become active in the wrong ways. Over the last 30 years, problems related to disruptive behavior, noise in classroom, and disciplinary issues have increasingly been put on the educational agenda—and for good reasons. Let’s just have a short look at some of the evidence that clearly testifies to the problems related to disruptive behavior in schools:

  • In a recent national Danish survey, 59% of the teachers reported to be exposed to disturbing noise in at least ¼ of the working time (Kristiansen et al., 2014).

  • Over the past 40 years, exclusionary discipline sanctions have increased by 40% in the US (Slee, 2014).

  • The high rates of attrition from the teaching profession are an increasing concern in many countries and they are being linked to disruptive behavior (Jenkins & Ueno, 2016).

  • On an annual British survey with 10,000 teachers responding, 68% responded that they felt there was a widespread behavior problem in schools (Jenkins & Ueno, 2016).

  • A national Danish survey from 2015 indicated that 1/3 of Danish students are plagued by noise and disruptive behavior in schools (Szulevicz, 2016).

The evidence clearly suggests that disruptive behavior is a global and major concern for students, teachers, parents, and policy-makers alike. An interesting point related to disruptive behavior is that teachers seem to be most concerned about the cumulative effects of disruptive behavior being caused by continued, but relatively trivial forms of student discipline problems (Hart, 2010).

There have been many different explanations to the seemingly permanent problems related to disruptive behavior ranging from a general disciplinary crisis, a general loss or decentralization of authority, student motivational problems, social segregation, and to a reformist and progressive pedagogy having had a massive influence on school politics since the 1970s and 1980s, and having led to a general slip in discipline in schools.

These different explanations might hold some of the answers, but I will not pursue them any further. Instead, I will argue that the current school context marked by LOM sets up a different context for the understanding of and attitudes toward student’s disruptive behavior compared to previously.

This is seen in many recent school reforms like, for instance, the latest Danish school reform that was implemented in 2014. It is broadly acknowledged that this reform represents a more outcome-oriented school with intensified emphasis on clear and testable objectives. One of the focus areas in the school reform is furthermore an emphasis on the need for more quietness in class and less disruption of teaching:

A national effort will be launched to strengthen classroom management and reduce disruption of teaching in the Folkeskole. The aim of the effort is to strengthen schools’ work to establish routines, norms and rules in support of a good learning environment and ensure that there is a focus on classroom management in order to develop teaching and teachers’ competencies (Szulevicz, 2016).

In Sweden, the Swedish Education Act from 2011 similarly puts emphasis on the urgent need of more quietness and more discipline in Swedish classrooms.

My claim is that one of the reasons why we see this new contextualization of disruptive behavior is the fact that there has been established a link between disruptive behavior and poor PISA-results in many countries, which probably also is one of the main reasons why the issue of school discipline has been increasingly politicized (Fredholm, 2017). The association between disruptive behavior and PISA-scores is, for example, evident in the following quote by Norwegian scholar Bru (2009) who analyzes why Norwegian students consistently perform badly on PISA-tests:

Classroom disruption is a major concern for schools. It can threaten the well-being of pupils and reduce learning outcomes because pupils have difficulties concentrating on the learning tasks or simply because of the loss of learning time (…). The PISA-results for Norway are in accordance with the assumption that disruptive behavior in schools has negative effects on learning outcomes. (Bru, 2009, p. 462, added emphases)

Generally, an orderly classroom climate is considered a precondition for good teaching and in the quote above, Bru uses the PISA-results from Norway to argue that disruptive behavior has negative effects on learning outcome and that disruptive behaviors lead to a loss of learning time.

It is a common held view that a generally indulgent and progressive pedagogy is considered to have caused turmoil in school, and as a reaction and as part of or maybe rather synchronously with the neoliberalization of education, a neoconservative trend is increasingly gaining an edge in education. The educational neoconservatism privileges academic rigor, core knowledge, traditional subject disciplines, and teacher authority but it also tends to promote a much narrower and fixed curriculum to which students are expected to comply, memorize, and rote learn (Keddie, 2015). And while this neoconservative orientation definitely has gained some momentum, the plea for more traditional teaching and more discipline in school is also regarded as an old-school orientation that does not entirely fit with the visions of good education in the twenty-first century.

But with the growth of LOM, new and subtler ways of disciplining and controlling students (and teachers) have emerged and in the following section, I will describe some of these new educational control strategies.

4 Control, Self-management, and the Taming of the School

Up until now, I have described how most Western educational systems increasingly are influenced by a logic of learning outcome (LOM), and how disruptive behavior and lack of school discipline are major concerns because they hinder effective teaching and thus student learning outcome. In that connection, progressive/reformist pedagogy has been identified as one of the reasons for the lack of belief in teacher authority among students and turmoil in schools.

Pongratz (2011) identifies reform pedagogy as a “soft” discipline where students are considered autonomous subjects with the teaching organized around the interests of the students. On one side, the soft disciplining of the reform pedagogy has been replaced by the neoconservative disciplinary turn that I described above. Among other things, this turn has led to an explosion in classroom management techniques that are meant to help teachers establish a quiet and calm environment in the classroom so that the students can take part in meaningful learning in a subject.

On the other side, the soft discipline known from the reform pedagogy has been supplied or altered by a neoliberal control or self-management technology that is an integral part of LOM. This soft disciplining of students has its roots in the neoliberal mode of subjection in which individuals are expected to make constant efforts to achieve their targets by being responsible, by showing ownership, by being able to self-regulate, by showing self-monitoring behavior, by positive thinking, and by self-management. This vision of the individual is also clearly visible in Martin and McLelland’s (2013) influential book The education of selves: How psychology transformed students. Martin and McLelland analyze how the image of the ideal student has changed as they identify how school psychology has promoted an image of the successful student as unique, active, self-directed, and self-disciplined. Furthermore, this ideal student is capable of monitoring own learning, evaluating own performances, and she is equipped with strategic tools for setting learning goals. This specific view of the learner aligns perfectly with the governmentality required of neoliberalism (Szulevicz, in press).

Drawing on Deleuze, Pongratz (2011, p. 163) describes how the neoliberal vision of the learner is engaged in new forms of control in which freedom and domination are linked in a paradoxical figure of voluntary self-control. This is, for example, the case with the notion of self-regulated learning (SRL) that has been promoted as a pedagogy associated with empowerment, agency, democratic participation, and personal responsibility (Vassallo, 2012). I am not arguing that self-regulation necessarily is a completely new educational ideal. In a cultural–historical tradition, Vygotsky’s (1929) ideas about mastering feelings and thoughts through cultural tools can also be considered self-regulatory processes. Nor am I arguing that children and students shouldn’t learn to regulate themselves. With Vassallo, my stance is rather that the current school context and the ways students learn to regulate their own learning basically represents a curriculum of obedience, subordination, and oppression as Vassallo further argues that SRL can be associated with a hidden curriculum that (1) strives at rendering students adaptable to existing social orders, (2) is guided at promoting a certain kind of self, and (3) makes students dependent on their teachers for learning necessary scripts to regulate their own learning. Vassallo’s critique of SRL is in line with Stoller’s (2015) critique of LOM as he argues that the systematic use of learning outcome is based on a deficit logic of the students, as they are expected to obey to some externally determined objectives.

Over the last 20 years, we have thus seen a gradual shift from a predominant progressive/reformist pedagogy toward a pedagogy in which the self-monitored and self-regulated student has become the ideal and where students are disciplined and controlled through self-regulatory practices and by goal-steering of their learning outcomes accompanied by a constant monitoring of learning targets.

Gert Biesta also criticizes LOM as he argues that the outcome-oriented school approach basically promotes “a rather un-educational way of thinking about education” (Biesta, 2014, p. 124) because the very fundamental and normative question about what “makes good education good” is not answered. So the dominant educational policies have disabled us from asking important questions about education, and as a consequence we have lost sight of how the central purpose of education is to help people learn how to be human (Gibbs, 2019).

Instead, the normative questions about “good education” have been replaced by educational technologies that aim to optimize student learning outcome. Similarly, Masschelein and Simons (2013) describe how modern schools—in order to become more efficient and productive—today are being converted into student-centered learning environments in which tradition has been substituted by a belief in the uniqueness of the learner. As a consequence, the individual student becomes the only focus of attention and she both becomes the starting point and the ending point of the learning process. And the result is a tamed student and a tamed school. Masschelein and Simmons (2013, p. 92) put it this way:

The taming of the school here means ensuring that students are kept small - by making them believe that they are the centre of attention, that their personal experiences are the fertile ground for a new world, and that the only things that have value are the things they value. The result is the taming of the student: he becomes a slave to his own needs, a tourist in his own life-world. The importance placed on learning to learn is perhaps the most telling expression of this attempt to tame. The pupil is thrown back upon his own learning, and the link to ‘something’ – to the world – is broken.

From this perspective, both the school and the individual student are being tamed by so-called educational strategies that seek to optimize individual student learning. With inspiration from Biesta and Masschelein and Simmons, my claim is that LOM and the neoliberal approach to education is entangled in politics of control, measurement, conformity, and obedience that basically are noneducational.

5 Changed Attitudes Toward Disruptive Behavior

In this paragraph, I will discuss how disruptive behavior is perceived in the tamed school. I am not necessarily arguing that the tamed school aggravates the problems related to disruptive behavior in the school. My stance is rather that LOM and the tamed school create a different context for the understanding of and the attitudes toward disruptive behavior. I will clarify my stance by illuminating how attitudes toward disruptive behavior generally are changing.

It seems that in almost every part of the world, teachers face increasing pressure in their working lives. They are made accountable for student performances, expectations are generally rising, and PISA and the OECD have introduced new global modes of governance in education that regulate teacher’s teaching practices. There seems to be a constant urge for raising standards as the different generated test scores are used to measure and compare teacher against teacher, school against school, and nation against nation (Stevenson, in press).

Generally, schools are confronted with demands for reforms and improvement and everything seems to be urgent, if you don’t want to lose against other and better performing school systems in different countries. Add to this the general downward pressure on public investment in general education and we have a situation where teachers are asked to produce a better outcome, while costs at the same time are kept down. From a neoliberal perspective, competition makes the better out of us. But a potential backside of the coin is that a systemic or structural restlessness is created in which students and teachers alike feel the pressure of ongoing measurement, performativity, accountability, and (self-) monitoring. As already mentioned, the teaching profession is globally witnessing high and increasing rates of attrition, and while the reasons for the increasing attrition rates inarguably are multiple, there are also dawning signs that teachers oppose to the standardization and quantification of their profession (Hardy, 2017). And while we often tend to focus on student well-being, we might be undermining the creative and professional autonomy of teachers and their sense of agency (Gibbs, 2019). We are thus gambling with teacher professionalism, autonomy, and well-being by imposing new and standardized regulatory tools on teachers’ work as suggested by Priestly, Biesta, and Robinson (2015, p. 125):

The combined influence of at least two decades of intrusive input and output regulation may well have to a large extent eroded teachers’ capacity for agency and have taken away important resources and opportunities for the achievement of agency from their practice.

As part of an empirical study on disruptive behavior in schools, I made interviews with different teachers. In one of the interviews, a teacher described:

With the new school reform, we were supposed to improve our classroom management techniques. But that’s paradoxical because the order in the classroom was actually disturbed by the new school reform since we spent way too much time on individual student assessment. As teachers we always have to evaluate where the students are in their individual learning processes and the students are supposed to do the same. And that’s a way to create turmoil and unrest, and it actually takes attention away from the proper teaching and the content of the teaching. We are spending way too much time on irrelevant activities. As a consequence I myself, and the students get bored and they start disrupting instead.

This is very much in line with Angus (2015) who describes how the standardized, assessment-based curriculum make schools more boring places for students—and particularly for less advantaged students “whose cultural dissonance with traditional, mainstream, conservative schooling practices and high-stakes testing is most pronounced” (Angus, 2015, p. 409). Every person with knowledge of the school knows how boredom and disruptive behavior tend to walk hand-in-hand, and bored students is one of the safest ways to create turmoil and a poor teaching and learning climate.

But the high pressure on teachers also tends to change teacher’s tolerance and attitudes toward less advantaged students and particularly disruptive students. A recent Danish study, for example, reported how Danish teachers emphasize how it is children with disruptive behavior that cause them the most trouble (Kristensen & Mørck, 2016). Kristensen and Mørck also point out that teachers generally have become less tolerant toward disruptive behavior. Their hypothesis is that this intolerance grows out of the increased focus on learning outcomes that fosters negative attitudes toward all kinds of student behavior that minimize learning outcome.

Over the last 10–20 years, most educational systems have worked toward more inclusive schools with a marked reduction in the number of students referred to special education services. Simultaneously, with regard to ADHD, there has been more than a tenfold (1.125%) increase over 10 years in the number of people being treated with medicine for ADHD (Langager, 2014). There have been a lot of different explanations for the dramatic rise in ADHD cases, and they range from increased awareness of the condition and improvements in how it is diagnosed, to pharmaceutical lobbying, or to the fact that the increase in school-accountability measures has changed teachers’ attitudes toward students who display ADHD-symptoms—either to get more funding or to explain low performance.

Irrespective of the different explanations, there is no doubt that a diagnosis is a powerful tool and social technology that obviously influences the way the surroundings perceive the diagnosed person. Timimi (2009, pp. 134–135) describes it this way:

In other words, it could be that changes in our cultural-environmental contexts are causing increases in ADHD-type behaviors and these, in turn, are changing our perception of childhood behavior, and our perception of and the meaning we give to it is, in turn, changing the way we deal with it and our common cultural practices around children (such as rearing and education), which in turn are further increasing these behaviors, and so on.

The rise in students diagnosed with ADHD also covers the fact that many of the students, who are described as being disruptive, increasingly get talked about in psychiatric terms (Szulevicz, 2016). In that sense, ADHD can be considered an extreme case of some of the new social representations of disruptive behavior, and it also both entails a further individualization and pathologization of disruptive behavior. If disruptive behavior increasingly gets perceived of as ADHD, it also goes from a state that previously required no diagnostics or treatment to now being formulated as a condition that calls for medical treatment.

6 Concluding Discussion

In this chapter, I have argued that teacher’s, policy-makers’, peers’, and parents’ attitudes toward student’s disruptive behavior change within an outcome-based school approach. One of the interesting trends these years is that persistent problems with disruptive behavior are used to legitimize new school reforms focusing on teacher authority and a narrower and fixed curriculum (Szulevicz, 2016), and disruptive behavior thus becomes increasingly politicized because policy-makers use the disruptions to legitimize new (neoliberal) school reforms.

I am in no way making light of the problems related to disruptive behavior in schools. This is one of the biggest problems that schools are facing. My aim is rather to stress how LOM subtly and maybe also counterintuitively might create new problems related to disruptive behavior by changing the general approach to disruptions and disruptive students.

I have argued that a very likely backside of the LOM approach is that a systemic or structural restlessness is created in which students and teachers alike feel the pressure of ongoing measurement, performativity, accountability, and (self-) monitoring. And this potentially leads to new disruptive behaviors, and it definitely risks changing teachers’, parents’, peers’, and policy-makers’ attitudes toward disruptive behavior.

So far, I have argued that our educational system has been tamed by a logic of learning outcome that fundamentally changes and corrodes the premises for education with huge consequences for the ways we think about and practice school, but also with important consequences for the understanding of disruptive behavior in schools.

From my personal view, alternatives to LOM are highly needed as it is my contention that these alternatives also may have a positive effect on our approach to the problems related to disruptive behavior in schools. As already pointed out, one of the problems with LOM is that it promotes an un-educational way of thinking about education that basically is characterized by a risk aversion, where schools are turned into learning communities that are controlled as effectively as possible. This can, for example, be illustrated by referring to Biesta’s (2010) three concepts or dimensions that he uses to define the functions of education: socialization, qualification, and subjectification. Schools have a role in socializing students into a societal order by passing on values and knowledge. Schools also have an important task in assuring that students have sufficient qualifications as citizens. These qualifications consist of basic academic skills or what more generally could be termed civic and critical literacy. Third, education deals with subjectification. Put shortly, subjectification is about how education should produce independent and autonomous individuals. The three different functions and dimensions of education are thought of as an analytical tool, but school’s overall assignment is contained in these three concepts and good education is about finding a balance between these different and separate dimensions.

If we go back to the progressive reform pedagogy, one could argue that this approach puts too much emphasis on the subjectification dimension of education giving a lower priority to the qualification dimension, and where the teacher is reduced to a facilitator of student learning. On the other hand, critics argue that LOM stresses the qualification dimension too narrowly, and on behalf of the other dimensions. This relates to a long discussion about the normativity of educational content. What I want to pursue in this context is how Biesta stresses how friction arises in the intersection between the different educational dimensions. The current stress put on qualification and on techniques that promote acquisition of qualification potentially also represents a reduction in the plurality, diversity, and complexity that education is all about, and with Biesta’s own words it requires “an erasure of what makes education difficult” (Biesta, 2001, p. 399).

If we return to the initial example from my talk on disruptive behavior and the teachers’ experiences of changing attitudes toward disruptive student behavior, I think it is an extremely important reminder of how we slowly are changing the fundamental premises of our school system and how it subtly might influence teacher’s perceptions of their students but also their professional self-perception. In his recent book, “Immoral Education: The assault on teachers’ identity, autonomy and efficacy”, British educational psychologist, Gibbs (2019), puts forward how teachers’ autonomy and professional identity are disregarded with new neoliberal educational policies and that we in general have been seduced into asking the wrong questions about education and what we want for society. The general teacher disrespect in society affects teacher well-being with immense impact on student well-being as well, and Gibbs argues how the best way to promote student well-being is by ensuring teacher well-being.

With LOM, we are thus creating a school that on the surface produces highly qualified and independent students. But we are also controlling and monitoring students and their behavior to a hitherto unseen extent. I have discussed some of these consequences in relation to understanding of disruptive behavior and in relation to education in general.

LOM was introduced as an answer to some evident and global problems in the educational sector with low-performing students and general problems with lack of discipline. Some of the educational changes that have been induced with LOM might have been necessary. However, the main problem is that a basically un-educational way of thinking about education has been promoted, and a response rooted in educational thought and philosophy is now needed. What LOM-based education got fundamentally wrong was to conceptualize education as a matter of individual and measurable student learning outcome. This error should be corrected by finding another way and by “bringing education back to education.” There are some encouraging signs in a great deal of the educational literature. As an example, I would like to point to Masschelein and Simon’s inspirational book (2013) “In defense of the school”:

Firstly, the teacher must free the child from all expertise that ascribes an immediate function, explanation or destination to what that child does. In a sense, ‘letting a kid be a kid’ is no empty slogan. This means allowing a child to forget the plans and expectations of his parents as well as those of employers, politicians and religious leaders in order to allow that child to become absorbed in study and practice. (Masschelein & Simons, 2013, p. 86)

A student is not just a “learner” who strategically sets goal for her learning processes, and a disruptive student is not only a student who disrupts the learning for herself and her peers. There is a need to tell and enact a different story about the student—both the student as a learner and the disruptive student. A way to enact these stories would be to investigate the phenomenon of disruptive behavior in (neoliberal) schools both theoretically and empirically. What is actually understood by disruptive behavior? Do our current educational system produce more disruptive behaviors? What are the long-term psychological consequences for children growing up in increasingly neoliberal educational regimes? How are increasingly individualized notions of disruptive behavior challenged? How do we maintain educational systems that are still open for heterogeneity, disturbances, and disruptions, while still acknowledging that disruptive school behaviors are legitimate concerns in our schools?